


And Then You Know

by Bimo



Category: The Nice Guys (2016)
Genre: Coming of Age, Families of Choice, Father Figures, Father-Daughter Relationship, Friendship/Love, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, March Family Sadness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 19:00:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,916
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11319636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bimo/pseuds/Bimo
Summary: Just a day in the life of Holly March. Sometimes you’ve got to keep your head up high and your shoulders straight to make it through this deep, heavy grown-up shit.





	And Then You Know

**Author's Note:**

> Due to its subjects and themes, I strongly doubt I would have posted this story if it hadn't been for the two lovely people who volunteered to read in advance. Special thanks go to Lymle1, for doing so much more than I expected! :)

AND THEN YOU KNOW  
by Bimo

**June 1978**

Holly March has been thinking a lot about friendship lately, in ways that feel overly self-centred and grown-up to her, almost like something taken right out of that young adult novella she and Jessica are reading in Mrs. Woodman’s English class at the moment. “What will become of us?” Jamie, the protagonist, seems to ask all the time. Not that Jamie’s fears ever get spelled out directly, but if you know where to look you can see them materialising between the lines.

Three weeks into the book, when Holly gets the chance to express all this in a class test, she is rewarded with a straight A, probably for proving her point by listing all the important scenes. Next to the A, Mrs. Woodman has drawn a smiley face, which strikes Holly sort of cute but at the same time embarrassing. After all she is in eight grade now; from September onwards she won’t go to _Eleanor Roosevelt_ middle school anymore but instead attend high school. A private one, because Dad says that during his time as a cop he has seen what public high schools are like in Los Angeles.

Holly hasn’t broken the news to Jessica yet, doesn’t know how to tell her most good-natured, non-backstabbing friend that after years of surviving spelling bees, algebra and Mr. Krupchek’s science lessons together, their paths will finally separate. Just this once Dad has the more rational argument on his side and also that one cruel sentence working for him which neither he nor Holly ever dare to speak aloud.

_\- It’s what Mom would have wanted, Sweetheart._

_\- It’s what Mom would have wanted, Dad._

“How do you always manage to come up with all the stuff Woodman likes?” Holly’s thoughts are interrupted by Jessica, whose eyes are switching back and forth between her own two tightly written pages and Holly’s three and a half.

“It just happens, I guess,” Holly replies, grabs her sheets and shoves the damn smiley A into her school bag. Acing tests is a superpower you only survive, socially survive, if you act as if you couldn’t care less.

“Did anyone else see it?”

“Don’t think so. Just relax. Everybody here knows you’re back to old form, Holly, and they’re still treating you as one of the cool kids.”

During lunchbreak Holly and Jessica hang out under their favourite schoolyard tree, a sycamore, very tall, with some of its branches crooked, and brightly green leaves that filter the sunlight. Holly is taking sips from her apple juice; conversation meanders from _Death on the Nile_ (consensus: Peter Ustinov is funny, but not as great as _Miss Marple_ ) to Jessica’s oldest brother, the one who deserted back in ’71 and now works under a false name as a tennis coach in a holiday club near Vancouver.

“I’m so fed up with spending every summer there, just because my mother wants to check on him. I mean, Mark’s not a baby anymore, he’s twenty-six, for Christ’s sake,” Jessica says, and then, after a brief pause, “You going someplace this year?”

“Nope. Not with the house thing going on.”

“Sorry, I should have thought of that. Your dad is really getting his act together again, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, sort of.”

Over the past few years, Jessica has witnessed more of Holland March’s unreliable, havoccy side than all of Holly’s other friends combined – his downs and utterly losts as well as the over the tops – and yet Holly firmly sticks to her rule not to really discuss Dad with anyone. It’s one of the first essentials she had grasped in the weeks after disaster had struck, even though she had just turned eleven at the time of the fire.

_\- Just don’t, Holly. Don’t tell anyone what kind of states Dad gets himself in, ’cause if you do, you might be put into foster care, or even worse, send off to live with gramps and grandma Stevenson on the other side of the Atlantic._

Thankfully Jessica seems to be getting the hint and steers into a brighter direction again.

“Any idea what colours you’re gonna pick for your room when the new house is ready?”

“Mmh… Maybe green and purple,” Holly says. “I don’t care, as long as it’s not yellow.”

The sound of the school bell reminds them it’s high time to walk back inside for their afternoon classes, first P.E. and then Krupchek. Holly suspects that whoever arranged their subjects like this and not the other way round has no idea how it feels to be showered in diagrams or valence dash formulas while still exhausted from hockey. Either that, or the unknown schedule designer delights in torturing children.

Krupchek isn’t really to blame though, she muses. Maybe a bit hard to follow, because whenever he gets passionate about atoms and stuff, he drifts into material far too advanced and his Eastern-European accent starts shining through. But most of the time Krupchek’s explanations make sense, and you can read what he writes on the blackboard even from a distance.

As Holly listens to him talking about the great phlogiston mystery and phlogiston versus oxygen, she figures that Krupchek might be one of the two or three teachers she is going to miss once she is out of this place.

“So, that’s all for today,” Krupchek says. “And next time you see a houseplant in need, just think of all lovely oxygen it produces and give it some water, yes? Oh, and I almost forgot. Carson, windows and chairs. March, blackboard duty.”

The noise level goes up instantaneously, now that Krupchek has finished. “See you at the bicycle stand,” Holly yells over to Jessica and then goes hunting for the cleaning rag. After a minute or so, the room and the board look okay again and Holly finds herself alone, rinsing her fingers from chalk dust under the faucet.

“Holly? Can I ask you something?” A face framed by brown, wavy hair appears in the open door. “I know, you probably want to get home, but I thought I’d better speak with you while Jessica’s not around.”

“Yeah, sure.” Holly says, mildly curious. Over the past three years she and Dinah Reardon have exchanged a couple of sentences at max. Not that there is anything wrong with Dinah, but to Holly she had always seemed as if she existed in some sort of parallel universe where girls never climbed, never got loud and still wore dresses or varying combinations of blouses and skirts every day. None of Dinah’s skirts were ever shorter than knee length, and during lunch hour you could usually find her reading on one of the benches.

“So, Dinah, what’s up?”

“You’re going to _Montgomery_ , too, aren’t you? I mean, after the summer holiday.”

“How’d you find out? It’s not like I told anybody.”

“Application day,” Dinah explains with a somewhat nervous smile. “Your father’s got this brown, slightly dented Mercedes with scratches all over, right? Kind of hard to miss on the parking lot.”

Dinah blushes, looks to the ground and then again back at Holly. “I… I just thought it would be nice to already know someone when we start there,” she continues. “After all, it’s a completely new place, new teachers, new people.”

“Uh, that would be cool,” Holly replies.

As she and Jessica ride back home on their bikes, Holly still wonders where Dinah’s offer of friendship had sprung from. Certainly not from a Janet-like “I’ll be nice and civil to you for as long as you let me copy your homework” kind of place, her instincts tell her. Dinah had seemed far too genuine to pull off that kind of shit, and, far more telling, she hadn’t asked any of the questions that she easily could have asked.

_\- When are you going to tell Jessica? (If you don’t, I will.)_

_\- How can your father afford sending you to a fancy school like_ Montgomery _? (He’s just a P.I., and a rather shady one for that matter. Plus, everyone knows that he drinks.)_

Ironically, the money question, while seeming the more poisonous one, would have been pretty easy to answer, with one nine-letter word that sufficed.

Insurance.

Holly has never asked Dad any details; the exact figures and legalities remain an adult paperwork mystery. But there’s a trust fund in her name, set up at birth, and after Mom’s death, Dad had put every single cent from Mom’s life policy into that fund so that Holly March, if she set her mind to it, could reach for the stars.

“Just because I am a fuck-up, doesn’t mean you have to be one,” Dad had explained his actions to her on the day he had signed everything, very serious and very brave, before going back to building small towers from crown caps.

Memories linger.

It has been a while since Holly last saw bottles lying around on the floor, but she still watches her step every time that she enters the rental. This afternoon all seems fine though, the kitchen counter is actually cleaner and tidier than she had left it. Next to the sink she finds sponges and Palmolive bottle parallelly arranged to the sink’s rim.

“Oh, hey Holly, didn’t hear you come in,” says the one person Holly has ever known to display such type of neatness. She turns her head, only to spot Mr. Healy sitting over at the dining table like some scruffy, unshakeable teddy bear with cute reading glasses on, in front of him a coffee mug and a map of Los Angeles.

“Want some cherry pie, kid? There’s one slice left in the fridge.”

“Hello, Mr. Healy. And yeah, thanks. Where’s Dad?” she asks, still astonished how safe this question feels. Ever since Dad had taken him in as a business partner, Mr. Healy’s presence usually just meant that he and Dad were doing detective stuff. Holly exhales. Dad is up, Dad is alright, Dad is working.

“Oh, he’s in that extra bathroom you’ve got, developing pictures,” Mr. Healy explains. “Last night we finally caught our poodle kidnapper on camera, but only from a few hundred yards distance. And now your father wants to find out if his Nikkor three hundred millimetre thingie paid off.”

“The new lens Dad got for the F2? Cool! Uh, let me guess, he threw you out.”

“Kind of.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Holly says. “He does that to me as well. Claims people looking over his shoulder while he’s fiddling around with chemicals make him all jumpy. Plus, that stupid second bathroom? So damn small, but the only place that makes sense. In our old house, we … ” Holly breaks off.

Mr. Healy just nods. No comment on her use of swear words or anything else, just a nod and an expression on his face, half frown, half understanding, as if silently letting her know, “Yeah, kid, I get it.”

One of the things she has come to realise about Mr. Healy is that he’s far smarter, far kinder than most people would give him any credit for. And also, he’s good at picking up on the small things, like how Dad, in the afternoon, is more of a coffee and cake person than a sandwich one.

Holly takes her slice of leftover cherry pie out of the fridge, only to find her assumptions confirmed. Something about the pie’s crust, still fresh and crispy, speaks “I’m not your standard supermarket fare but come straight from the small German bakery one block away from the Comedy Store.”

“What do you need the map for?” she asks, sitting down opposite Mr. Healy.

“Trying to see if there’s a pattern to where our guy likes to strike. You have no idea how many dog parlours specialised in grooming prized show poodles there are in southwest L.A..”

Mr. Healy points at the pencil marks he has made on the map. “See? Circles for parlours, X for the places he’s already been to.”

Next to each X, Mr. Healy has written a number. One, two, five, four… ah, there’s three.

“Looks pretty arbitrary,” Holly says.

“Yup. Exactly what I thought at first. But if you draw a line from parlour to parlour to form a spiral, inward, not outward-”

A loud “Yihaa!” interrupts Mr. Healy mid-sentence. Then, a thud and a clank, Dad rushing out of his makeshift photo lab, almost tripping over his feet in the process.

“Jackson, we’ve got him!” he shouts.

Mr. Healy, still perfectly calm, throws Dad one of his _Damn you, March, one of these days you will break your neck with this kind of shit_ looks.

As Holly sees Dad catching his breath with his cheeks all flushed, she can’t decide whether the shine in his eyes stems from booze or excitement. Give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for the moment, she tells herself. Dad blinks, then stares disbelievingly. First at her, then at Mr. Healy. Now back at her.

“Holly, you’re home? Is it already half past four or did something happen at school?”

“Closer to five, actually,” she replies; the words come over her lips way more curtly than she had intended. A Dad who remembers when she’s supposed to be back is either sober or – the more likely option even with Mr. Healy around – he hasn’t had all that much. Maybe one or two drinks over lunch, Holly figures.

“Sorry, must have lost track of time while I was working on those pictures.”

“Never mind,” Mr. Healy says. “So, who’s our poodle kidnapper?”

“None of the folks we’ve talked to so far. But the shot’s good. I’ll show you.”

On a clothes line going from one side of the shower curtain rod to the other, there are several pictures hanging from pins, doubtlessly the various stages that Dad had gone through while figuring out what exactly he wanted or needed. Holly steps closer and examines how the first couple of pictures still show the whole person, a middle-aged-aged man with a receding hairline, wearing a suit and a bow-tie. Then, already enlarged, one lucky shot in which the guy is tilting his head, looking upward, probably to keep an eye on the traffic lights. And yes, near perfect three quarter profile. What follows is an even larger image of the man’s face. However the contrasts are low so the whole thing seems kind of blurred.

Cautious not to brush against any of Dad’s bottles with chemicals, Holly moves sideways past Mr. Healy to have a look at the final picture, grainy but in its own way amazing. Poodle guy is a distinct individual here, someone you would recognise if you spotted him on the street, mostly because of his eyebrows and slightly upwards pointing nose.

“So, what’s our next move?” Mr. Healy asks.

“Well, that depends.”

The longer she listens to Mr. Healy and Dad, who is pacing up and down between sofa and bar, thinking and walking and lighting a cigarette, the more Holly realises that Dad is trying to play this thing careful. Maybe an effect of last year’s Amelia case, she muses. So fucking huge, so fucking scary. How harmless finding Amelia had seemed in the beginning.

“Let’s just use our advantage and keep an eye on that dog parlour,” Dad finally says. “Where did you say our friend should strike next, Jackson, if your theory’s right? _Trixie Belle’s Glamour_?”

“Yes, _Trixie Belle’s Glamour_.”

The matter-of-factly tone in which Mr. Healy repeats the dog parlour’s name makes it hard to keep a straight face. She can hear Dad is supressing a chuckle as well, so silly does all of this sound if spoken aloud.

Poodle guy, for all they know at this point (and they don’t know very much) might just be a prankster, mild-mannered and unarmed. Who can tell with a person, though, that kidnaps show dogs and returns them alive and happy after the ransom is paid - however with their fur shorn and the remaining tufts coloured pink? There’s a certain spiteful lunacy lurking behind all the cutesy stuff, Holly thinks. Something Janet-like.

Not that Dad would ever get the crazy Janet connection. But the general idea? Sure.

It seems that Mr. Healy’s presence does wonders for Dad’s willingness to get into detail, to really nail facts down instead of simply letting them slide.

_\- You can’t leave Dad alone for too long, he needs someone to play with._

How often Mom had teased them, both her husband and daughter, with this very notion, near every damn time they had been engaged in doing some “Dad’n’Holly” stuff. There must have been pictures, Holly thinks, most likely Polaroid snapshots, but now she is left only with what she remembers.

Her favourite moments, still bright and vivid: Assembling her then brand new orange bicycle the night before her eighth birthday.

(It should have been a surprise but she had woken up because of Dad cursing.)

Another memory amidst all those slowly fading: Putting up Christmas lights round the house.

(Mom had forbidden Dad to go anywhere near the roof, since it had been raining for the better part of the week and the roof was still slippery.)

It was becoming increasingly hard to remember how Mom truly sounded like, Holly realises.

She looks up.

“Wanna stay over for dinner, Jack?” Dad asks Mr. Healy. “We could order something from that Chinese place that you like.”

For a moment Mr. Healy seems tempted, smiles, but declines in the end, ‘cause he’s got other plans for the evening. “Boxing match,” he says. Tenth row seat, still close enough to the ring that he can see everything properly.

As Mr. Healy walks out, he turns around one final time, waving the ticket above his head.

“See you tomorrow at eight, March. Bye, Holly.”

Dad waves back. Holly isn’t sure whether his slightly pained grin is because of the early hour or because he can’t stand boxing. Even without Mr. Healy, they end up ordering Chinese anyway.

The boxes with Dad’s Kung Pao Chicken and Holly’s Fried Noodles arrive just in time, and right with unpacking food, chopsticks and soy sauce also comes a realisation. If there’s one aspect, one single thing that feels right about the damn rental, it is the large open kitchen area. They both like the high bar counter and stools; Dad likes having easy access to the cookie jar.

“Could we get a counter like this one, or is it already too late?” Holly asks.

“Mhm, maybe, at least on a smaller scale. It’s not like I’ve already made any decisions or bought anything.”

“Aw, Dad! Didn’t you say we had to keep an eye on delivery times and not buy last minute?”

“Yes, I did. And no, Holly, it’s more complicated than that.”

While Dad isn’t drawing a clear, red line with words, she can tell they have reached one of Dad’s _Please Holly, don’t push me, I’m not ready yet_ moments.

Fuck. She should have known.

Fucking kitchen stores. Fucking, super dumb shop assistants with fucking questions.

_\- What kind of stove do you have in mind, Mr. March? Electric? Gas?_

“Let’s just have a kitchen that is not like the old,” Holly says. Dad nods in agreement.

Sometimes you’ve got to keep your head up high and your shoulders straight to make it through this deep, heavy grown-up shit. Goofing around with chop sticks helps, Holly finds out. Whistling helps, TV helps, and also reading in bed. Reading until the words start to dance in front of your eyes and you fall asleep with the lamp on your night stand still on.

When Holly wakes up around two o’clock in the night and tiptoes into the kitchen to get herself a glass of water, she can see Dad – still up, or up again? – through the glass door that leads out into the rental’s garden. Dad is sitting at the edge of the empty pool, wearing nothing but his bathrobe and boxer shorts, his naked feet are dangling into what Mr. Healy likes to call the world’s biggest ashtray. While there’s a bottle of beer next to Dad on the concrete slabs, he doesn’t appear like he has completely lost it, though. Too much posture, Holly thinks. Also, completely lost Dad wouldn’t bother to search the skies with a pair of binoculars. So it’s probably safe to walk through that door and figure out what on Earth he is doing.

“Jesus, Holly!” Dad gives a brief, startled squeal as she approaches him. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping at this time of night?”

“Can I just sit with you for a moment?” she asks. “I don’t really feel like going back to bed right now.”

“Sure. Come here.” 

Holly lowers herself down on the concrete and although she is not a child anymore, but, damn it, thirteen and a half, there is something about the way Dad offers to put his bathrobe around her shoulders that makes her want to cry.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong? If it’s the new school that’s still troubling you, this is the one thing where you’ll just have to trust me. I thought you liked the place when we checked it out.”

“It’s not the school,” she hastens to say. “More like the school on top of everything else.”

“So you can feel it, too?”

“Feel what?”

“Things happening, life moving forward again,” Dad replies, looking out into the sea of lights that surrounds them. It’s an unusually clear, smog-free night for L.A., Holly notices.

“What were you doing with the binoculars?” she asks, half guessing, half knowing what Dad is aiming at.

“Something stupid. Seeing if I could catch us a falling star or at least some crashing chopper.”

Though Dad tries hard to be funny, she can see how he swallows. It takes Dad a while before he continues, his eyes all gone watery, red-rimmed.

“I think I’ve started wishing again. Not really sure why. But man, does it hurt.”

“Wishing is good, Dad,” Holly replies, because in some situations you’ve got to be very firm with your parents, firm with yourself. Holly is well aware that nothing hurts more than getting your hopes up too quickly. She’s been there, she’s done that, but this moment feels different to her, so maybe, just maybe, this time Dad has started fighting for real.

There are other hopes, other wishes, too, strangely connected.

Hoping that Mr. Healy will stay around and that one day she will manage to call him Jackson (or even Jack, just as Dad sometimes does) without fearing to jinx this weird not-quite-but-almost-family thing that they’ve got going.

Hoping that Dad and Mr. Healy will catch poodle guy without anybody getting injured or killed.

“Let’s get you back to bed, Holly. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day for both of us,” Dad says gently. They get up and walk back inside.

When Holly tells Jessica about _Montgomery_ on the next day during lunch break _,_ Jessica just takes one good look at Holly, then she splits her KitKat bar in two and hands one half over.

“Holly, who cares which stupid school you’ll go to? We’ve known each other since kindergarten and once you’ve moved, your new house is gonna be two houses away from ours. If we want to, we can stay best friends forever.”

Holly chews quietly and listens to how the wind keeps rustling through the leaves of her favourite tree.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yup, I'm a silly European and everything I know about the US school system I learned from TV shows, movies and Google. Please bear with me, folks. I tried my best.


End file.
